[RFC] Print diffs of UTF-16 to console / patches to email as UTF-8...?

I am currently thinking about what the best way to preset readable (and safely email-able) patches to the user may be when the content is UTF-16. This is part of my ongoing work to treat UTF-16 as text (in other words, the crlf options will work and .gitattributes hacks won't be required to display diffs, etc). I was also concerned that the result be re-importable to valid UTF-16 in the end. This has led me to consider printing diffs as UTF-8 (no data loss, at least 16->8) when the source text is UTF-16. This should also be git-gui / gitk friendly (in theory). I would favorably consider this as a configurable option (export_unicode_diff_as_utf8 ?) leaving plain UTF-16 output as the standard output from "git diff" (once I convince it that UTF-16 is indeed text). Also, there is the issue of being able to recognize UTF-16 as UTF-16 in diffs/patches. Is there a precedent/standard I should be aware of with respect to BOMs and patches? I would think that adhering to the UTF-16 standard with respect to whole text files would make sense here (no BOM == Big Endian, BOM used to match LE/BE otherwise).

Comments welcome!